A day in the cabbage patch

UCF students plucked and piled 10,000 pounds of cabbage for farmworkers at a Mount Dora farm Saturday morning until exhaustion sank in.

It only took a few hours for the volunteers to realize their bodies demanded water and food.
“It was hot, dirty and there were lots of bugs,” junior political science major Kevin Alvarez said. “I am grateful that I could wake up Saturday morning in an apartment at Alafaya.”

While cutting the roots off cabbage with knives had produced blisters and scrapes, several students realized their labor was only a glimpse of conditions a farmworker experiences.

According to the National Center for Farmworker Health, dehydration, heat stress, falls and pesticide poisoning are frequent injuries in farm labor.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 300,000 farmworkers are poisoned each year.

“It just shocked me the way this community was being treated,” Lariza Garzon, a network coordinator at the National Farm Worker Ministry (NFWM), said. “The people that get screwed are the farmworkers.”

Garzon said she has talked to a lot of farmworkers since she interned in 2004 at the NFWM, and some of the workers have said they lack water and sanitation. She said for instance that a cup of water is shared by a group of people.

Garzon said the continuous exposure to pesticides and lack of training in this area is a problem.

“If you went to your office every day and everything you touched was toxic how would that make you feel?” Garzon said. “What if you had to do this every single day to support your family?”

The gleaning event coordinated by NFWM was organized to bring students from Rollins and UCF into the field, so they can experience the hardship of farmwork, learn about problems involved in farm labor such as pesticides, and donate the cabbage leftover to farmworkers.

“We do this for two reasons,” Garzon said. “Gleaning is an amazing thing and people who are hungry get this food.”

Becky Brown, a member of the Society of Saint Andrew who helped with the event said the 10,000 pounds of cabbage picked would serve about 30,000 people.

The students picked cabbage from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Several students including interdisciplinary women’s studies major Dominique Aulisio were overjoyed by the turn out. She is also a member of Student Labor Action Project.

“I was really happy about the gleaning because I felt like I learned a lot more about farmwork,” Aulisio said. “Every time it makes me appreciate my food a lot more.”

Aulisio said this was her second time gleaning this field. She said she gleaned corn during her last visit. Aulisio also encouraged some of her friends to participate, including senior David Blackburn, a communication disorder major.

“I could only imagine how much time and work goes in,” Blackburn said.

Although the gleaning event produced 10,000 pounds of plucked cabbage, there were still rows of cabbage left in the field.

The problems involved in farm labor were also made more real to several students including Alvarez.

“The most I could relate to them was today,” Alvarez said. “Even if I have seen any sort of discrimination, it wouldn’t compare to the way they feel.”

Another problem faced by farmworkers is low wages. Garzon said, in her experience working with farmworkers, she has seen that farmworkers get paid between 18 to 30 cents per produce they pick.

“That’s a lot of work and the wages don’t go up,” Garzon said.

According to findings from the 2001-2002 National Agricultural Worker Survey, 30 percent of all farmworkers had family incomes below the poverty guidelines.

“I would definitely be frustrated knowing that no matter how hard I worked I would probably never have as much money as I needed to live comfortably,” Aulisio said. “There’s a huge community of people that don’t have social services and face a lot of financial struggles.”

Garzon said many farmworkers are afraid to speak out because of threats some of them face from being undocumented. She said nobody knows exactly how many farmworkers are affected by pesticides because there is not enough accurate research on the conditions of farmworkers.

She advocates better enforcement on legislation regarding farmworker rights including training on pesticides.

“In reality enforcement is the problem,” Garzon said. “There is no system where workers know their rights.”
 

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1 comments

Liz

Mon Apr 6 2009 20:14

This article is an embarrassment! First, it is so poorly written I can not believe a college student wrote it. Sentences jump from one topic to another without making any sense and the paragraph structure is a joke. What upsets me the most, however, is the writer’s failure to write about the actual topic: A Day in the Cabbage Patch.

As I understand it from talking directly with local farm workers, a group of students from UCF visited a farm to harvest cabbage to be donated to local food banks. I admire the students for their will to do such good work. I also admire the farmer, who donated all of the cabbage and the equipment and farm manpower needed to assist the students.

Farming is very hard work, there is no doubt about it, and I believe the students who participated in this effort came to realize that. However, randomly throwing in national statistics about poor work conditions and low wages in the same context with information regarding the local farm the students worked in, is most unkind and not accurate. It seems to me, the purpose of this article was to let the community know that UCF students care about the community and are active in community projects, and to give an account of the experience the students had. Very little of that came through in this article.

The statistics in this article may very well be true on a national level, however, I am certain that they are not true at Long Scott Farms. Farming is hard work with little financial reward. You have to rely on the weather and hope you have a good crop, and when you don’t you still have the majority of expenses that you would have had with a good crop. People think that growing crops means tossing some seeds into the ground and then picking the crop a few weeks later. Not only is there expense in manpower, but also in tractors and other heavy equipment, fertilizers and pesticides, storage and packing facilities, and all of the common expenses associated with other businesses. Farms even have to buy bees and other insects for plant pollination. Farming is complex, and good workers are essential to making a farm function well. Farms, like Long Scott, value their workers and treat them with fairness and respect.

Hats off to the students who spent the day in the cabbage patch, working hard to donate to our local food banks and to Long Scott Farms for providing the opportunity and the cabbage. Thumbs down to the author of this article who obviously didn’t do her homework.

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